1. Field of the Invention
The invention is a rotary jaw crusher.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The closest known prior art to this invention is the "Gyrozontal Crusher" manufactured by the Eagle Crusher Company of Galion, Ohio. In similar fashion with my invention this prior crusher employs an eccentrically mounted rotatable roller and a curved stationary plate. Actually the crusher has two opposed plates one of which is concave and the other convex with the rotatable roller of about the same curvature and size centered therebetween. Although there are some similar structural characteristics, there are also important structural and functional differences from the present invention. Structurally my invention employs only a single large concave stationary jaw extending about 120 degrees around a rotatable roller towards its lower side. Functionally, this design allows the material to be horizontally supplied to the crusher rather than vertically as in the Gyrozontal Crusher.
Jaw crushers now in widespread use have proven to be satisfactory for most of their intended purposes such as their feed size, hard rock capability, reduction ratio, product characteristics, throughput, and economy. However, in mines and other areas where headroom is a problem these crushers with their conventional top feed arrangement required too much headroom, particularly if slabby material (which would have to be vertically oriented) is to be handled. Several horizontal feed jaw crushers have been used in which the conventional crushers are simply placed on their edge. With this arrangement a horizontal chain conveyor travels just beneath the lower edge of the jaws to move material through the machine. FIGS. 1 and 2 illustrate, respectively, a top and side view of this kind of prior art set-up. This type of feed arrangement, which is different from the uniform gravity feed of the standard upright configuration, causes a migration of the finer material normal to the thruflow direction, thus encouraging early choking in the vicinity of the chain conveyor. To overcome these problems this invention employs a specially construction rotary jaw crusher which employs a curved flow path to both decrease the vertical dimension of the jaws themselves and to provide for a horizontal feed without the above problems.